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I'm not sure you realize what you have just done...
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Enough that you're having fun when you roll dice.
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Depends on too many factors, including other party members.
IF a number could be determined, it may be something along the lines of one or two times the reciprocal of the number of characters that see themselves as primarily damage dealers, multiplied by the average HP of a creature 2-3 CRs below your current APL. If that makes sense.
There is no one good number for this. It depends on your group, what class you are playing, and personal taste.
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As above, but if you're at sixth level and one attack with your magic hammer deals 1d6+2, you may want to reevaluate your role in the party.
I would look at the DPR threads. They are decent guides since they use good characters, but not "the best" characters.
It's much easier to determine these kinds of things on a case by case basis. Even aside from party makeup, and group playstyle there are a million abilities and other factors that affect your combat viability without affecting damage even as a primary melee/ranged character.
These things are easier to consider on a case by case basis. If you are looking for advice for one of your characters or even your group as a whole, I suggest providing the community some more specific information. You're much more likely to get some unambiguous advice from everyone that way.
DPR depend on a lot of things.
In one of our games the ranger could have dealt quite a lot of damage if his dice would have allow it. But he seems to roll rather low.
He doesn't seem to be upset about it and is enjoing his pc.
Our late rogue on the other hand did what I would guess (never took notes or something)was about the same as the ranger but the player thought his DPR were too low and rolled a new pc.
My late magus once more did little more damage but in a more burst like style and part of the party thought he was too strong. A problem solved by him being killed in a single turn by a random monster after singlehandedly bringing it down to 4hp in one full attack action (that was at level 6).
tl;dr
If the party often runs into problems because the overall damage output is too low everyone should see what he can to to change that.
If the party is doing fine that's ok, even if one pc contributes little in combat but does his hsare out of combat.
Enough to take down anything up to your level in terms of CR in one full attack action that connects and deal full damage (DR, miss chance, mirror image etc all can stop this from happening). Most fighters/paladins etc that I have seen in my games have no problem achieving this.
After level 6 or so, you should have enough to hit that you only miss on a natural 1 on your first primary attack, and enough AC to make anything that is not an "elite" need at least a 15 to hit.
Of course, it is not YOUR job alone to make sure that you achieve these numbers. Any sane group does this strange little thing called team work, wherein the casters debuff the opposition and buff you. (Inb4 some short bus candidate even argues that there is ANY spell that is as amazing as Haste and/or Slow in terms of devastating effectiveness.)
I also agree that being able to take down a equal CR opponent in a single full attack is a good goal but hitting on a 2 at lvl 6? 20+ AC is not particularly rare for CR 6 opponents. What 6th lvl fighter manages a +20 to hit with power attack?
Perhaps not in ALL instances, but moreso than not.
Stuff that helps to-hit:
Bab:+6
Str:+4 to 6, depending on point buy and items
Training:+1
Focus:+1
Weapon:+1
Haste:+1
Generic non-must buff (bard song, bless, prayer, etc): +1 to +3
Tactical sense (flank, high ground etc): +1 to +3
If you are a two-handed fighter, I assume you would want to invest in furious focus to get the most out of your precious few attacks, so the first hit does not suffer degradation from Power Attack.
Now you are smacking gobs at +15/+13/+8, which means that the two first attacks are likely to hit, for somewhere around (weapon)+13 to 18, depending on str and buffs.
Remove the wizard/sorcerer/summoner/whatnot casting Haste, and you are severely reduced in effectiveness, obviously.
Suffice to say, I play in a lv7 group where I am the bard. I cast Good Hope and Inspire Courage in round 1, for +4 to hit and damage. Then the sorc casts Haste. Even my bard hits for +14/+14 and 1d8+16 or so after all the buffs. Imagine what the actual fighting types do.
That said: What is a good DPR for a non-buffed fighter? I guess "High enough to kill stuff before you are killed", because it has never happened in any game I have played or GM'd that we have not had buffs.
I have a 16th level Fighter[Archer] in my group who dealt 230-ish damage to a linnorn in one full round. The holy bow and adamantine arrows helped a little - knowing what you're going up against is highly important. Love your knowledge monkeys.
Generally, I'd say about 1/4 of the hit points of a monster that is equal CR to you. More is great, less doesn't mean you're completely useless, but if you deal 1/4 total hp/round you're pulling your weight. So at 3 it's about 7.5 DPR against AC 15, at 6 about 17 vs AC 19 and at 11 it's about 40 vs AC 25.
If your only job is damage, it should be at least maybe 20% higher or so. This is more for rangers, rogues, and anyone else who do something beside damage.
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Stripping the combat system down to it's very basics (i.e. removing Ability Score modifiers, Class Features, Feats, Magic Items, Spells, auto-hits on 20, auto-misses on 1, criticals, etc.) you've got on the attack side an increasing BAB but a static damage, and on the defense side a static AC but an increasing number of hit dice.
Assuming the best 'stripped down' AC is considered 21 (+9 for armour and +2 for shield - the tower shield complicating things by trading to-hit chance for AC) and a basic melee weapon does 1 die of damage (so, keeping it abstract, we can assume it usually takes one successful strike per hit die to drop an opponent) we have a starting position where at level 1 you only hit your opposite number 1 time out of twenty, but only need one successful strike to drop him. Each level your BAB (assuming full BAB progression, of course) increases your chance to hit by one, so you're hitting one more time per twenty swings, but the number of successful strikes you need to land also increases by one. When you hit level 20 you're hitting with every strike, but need twenty successful strikes to drop the other guy.
So the basic system is built around the concept of needing an average of 20 swings to drop your mirror image, at level 1 all the way through to level 20.
Obviously when you start to factor in everything else it gets more complicated, but it can be helpful to keep the basics in mind, especially the concept that the system is balanced for increasing BAB/static AC and static damage/increasing hit points. Generally the goal of any character is to use the resources they have to upset that balance in their favour. However, characters are generally built with limited resources, so hard choices have to be made when it comes to what you want to focus on. If you choose to use a two-hander weapon you'll get more damage, but without a shield less AC. If you invest Feats in increasing your chance to score a successful hit, and to inflict more damage with each hit, you're not spending those Feats on increasing your AC or Hit Points.
So (in an incredibly round-about way, sorry...) there's no real thing as an 'adequate DPR' if you're spending the resources you would have spent on increasing your DPR on increasing your defense instead. Generally you should end up just as effective as your high DPR friend, you just go about it a different way (a high defense / low DPR build will generally take longer to drop the bad guys, but can last longer too, so it evens out in the long run). Of course, as others have mentioned, this is usually a team game, so what the rest of your team is doing, and what they're expecting you to do as well, also comes into play. A 'glass cannon' high DPR / low defence character can be rendered pointless quickly (by being taken out of combat early on), and can be a drain on party resources (with a constant need to be healed or raised from the dead, etc.). A 'tank' low DPR / high defence character can be worthless to his team if he can't stop the bad guys getting past him to slaughter all his pals in robes standing behind him... It's usually a matter of finding the right balance somewhere between the two extremes.
Also keep in mind that often tactics have to evolve over the course of a campaign. For the first three or four levels of play it's hard to deny that the 'charge in with the biggest two-hander you can find and maximum Strength' tactic is hard to beat - because at those low levels opponents often drop in one or two swings. It seems like a no-brainer at the start of the game. But remember that increasing BAB / static AC Vs static damage / increasing Hit Dice thing? As you level up you should, as a general rule, find yourself hitting more, but needing more hits to drop the bad guys. As soon as you're at a level where you're not dropping them in a round or two, then a formerly unbeatable raging Barbarian with a greatsword can find himself in trouble. At that point you could pump absolutely everything you've got into extra damage, to try to reclaim the 'glory years' of low level combat, or focus on being able to last longer in combat. That 'stripped down' example of needing 20 average hits at level one and level twenty? The difference between level one and level twenty there is that at level one, needing only the one hit to win, you're unlikely to ever need to last the full twenty rounds to finish the fight. At level twenty if you can't last the twenty rounds, you're guaranteed to lose. Of course actual play, with all its myriad complications, is far removed from such a stripped down example, but the general principle is that what's 'adequate DPR' is also a moving target as you level up.
Ah... long-winded and waffly... sorry again... but I hope it makes some sort of sense?
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I'd say your "to hit" is going to be more important than DPR. I'd rather consistantly hit than miss, but you also have to remember that around level 3-4 enemies start to have about 5/DR, levels 7-8 its gonna bump to be around 10/DR, and then around level 11-12 its gonna jump again to 15/DR. Make sure you have enough to at least be chipping away past that and you should be contributing.
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/monsterCreation.html
I would say that if you party as a whole can't drop a creature of CR=APL in 3 round of flat ground "final destination" style fighting then you probably need to boost the parties performance. 3 rounds is a long fight for as easy an encounter that.
The full BAB classes need to boost their DPR to justify not having the depth of options that other classes have, or have combat versatility that justifies the sacrifice of damage. Nobody wants the full dex fighter that hits like a wet noodle (even if hits often), unless he is has some sort of crowd control that makes it worth losing encounter ending damage.
The 3/4 BAB need to use their class abilities to boost their output enough to justify not having full BAB, most classes have damage and to hit things they can do to increase one or both.
The 1/2 BAB classes are all spellcasters, so they either need to have encounter ending spells that ignore hp (and thus need to have save DCs that will on average end thing as quickly as just having Big Dumb Fighter hit things), have some way to ensure that they do their fair share of buffing/crowd control/debuffing, or have a way to make spell damage keep up with martial damage (which is harder than it sounds if the martials are even remotely built well).
Generally, I'd say about 1/4 of the hit points of a monster that is equal CR to you. More is great, less doesn't mean you're completely useless, but if you deal 1/4 total hp/round you're pulling your weight. So at 3 it's about 7.5 DPR against AC 15, at 6 about 17 vs AC 19 and at 11 it's about 40 vs AC 25.
If your only job is damage, it should be at least maybe 20% higher or so. This is more for rangers, rogues, and anyone else who do something beside damage.
I like these calculations... I'm not sure how accurate they are, but they do sound like a reasonable enough guideline.
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I used to play WoW quite religiously. I raided regularly, sometimes three or four times a week. My guild was one of the top raiding guilds on our server. I was in the "A" team which meant we had the job of figuring out how to defeat the boss encounters so that the rest of the guild could learn from our videos and guidance.
It was some pretty serious stuff.
One of the main things we had to do to maintain our spots in the starting rotation was to maintain sufficiently high DPS or HPS rates. If you couldn't keep up, you got demoted to one of the other raid teams. So maintaining DPS or HPS was an obsession. I played a rogue so it was all about the DPS for me. If I wasn't one of the top 3 in our 25 man raids, I would retune, re-gear, re-train and spend hours on the practice dummies until I had everything working so my DPS was again at the top of the list.
I enjoyed that in WoW.
I hate that in Pathfinder/D&D.
I build good solid characters capable of doing their job, but I don't even care if my DPR is meeting some benchmark. In fact I don't even want to know what the benchmarks are.
I'm not sure if that's because I just got tired of that in WoW, or if I just don't think it's appropriate in an RPG. All I know is that I really don't care what the baselines are supposed to be. I just want to play my character.
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As above, but if you're at sixth level and one attack with your magic hammer deals 1d6+2, you may want to reevaluate your role in the party.
You know, I was in a game where a level 11 "fighter" in the group had many rounds where he could not get into double digits of damage. If you above level 6 and can't do double digit damage somehow, you JUST maybe under what you should be at. If your at level 11 and can't do it...I don't wanna say your doing it wrong...but your doing it wrong.
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At level 8 with bulls str (no belt) (total 24 str), diviner bonus on d20 roll, +2 sword, and and intimidated opponent (+2 cavalier cockatrice bonus), two handed with furious focus I had around +20 on my first swing and did 1d8 + 29 (challenge included) and 1d6 fire.
The above included two buffs from the wizard and a specific sword from an AP. it was disgusting and I felt a little bad, but the next fight showed me how annoying crowd control can be to my dps. (It's hard to attribute the damage to the wizard since I don't know where the hit/miss line was)
If not obvious I find the 60+ damage full attack at level 8 to be a bit high, especially since its not an optimized party. I have plenty of challenges to do it most combats, non challenge of. 44 is probably more on target for lvl8.
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At level 8 with bulls str (no belt) (total 24 str), diviner bonus on d20 roll, +2 sword, and and intimidated opponent (+2 cavalier cockatrice bonus), two handed with furious focus I had around +20 on my first swing and did 1d8 + 29 (challenge included) and 1d6 fire.
The above included two buffs from the wizard and a specific sword from an AP. it was disgusting and I felt a little bad, but the next fight showed me how annoying crowd control can be to my dps. (It's hard to attribute the damage to the wizard since I don't know where the hit/miss line was)
If not obvious I find the 60+ damage full attack at level 8 to be a bit high, especially since its not an optimized party. I have plenty of challenges to do it most combats, non challenge of. 44 is probably more on target for lvl8.
Actually 44 DPR at level 8 is probably on the high side based on extrapolating from what my fighter can do at 6. 60+ is flat out ridiculous, however that said you did have a bunch of buffs up.
I forgot to drop the bulls strength and the diviner bonus, that should bring me out of auto hitting dropping it a bit. I miss a lot normally, and my 2nd swing is lucky to connect.